and avarice, wrath and rapine, falsehood and deceit, envy and malice, hatred and jealousy, crime and vice, sorrow and suffering, filth and disease confront him everywhere. He is keenly responsive to human sufferings and the groans and sighs of the agonized hearts. The misery of the multitude touches his heart. His flesh creeps, his heart is heavily oppressed, and his spirit is depressed at the sight of this dark side of human life. He suffers at the sight of suffering and, with eyes suffused with tears, he lives from day tmto day thinking and brooding over the woes of the world. Zarathushtra doubts the goodness of gods.
He is religious at heart, but his daily experience of the religion practised and lived around him tends to estrange him from the faith of his forefathers. He sees with horror temples reeking with the blood of sacrifical animals. He finds that barren formalism, sanctimonious scrupulosity, meticulous ablutions, superstitious fear, and display of external holiness pass for religion. Zarathushtra doubts the religion of his birth.
Zarathushtra seeks silent, solitary seclusion. Solitude is nature's sublime temple where spirit can commune with spirit in the surrounding silence and unruffled calm. Mountains lift their heads majestically on the Iranian plateau, and Zarathushtra retreated into the mountain fastness. Here, far removed from the stress and strife of life, and with no human sound to distract his thoughts, he made his home. He breathed the refreshing air. The twittering and chirping and whistling and singing of birds filled the air. Here the earth and waters, birds and beasts, sun and moon, stars and planets worked as his teachers. He read some lesson, some message written by the hand of the maker of all on every pebble and every leaf, every dewdrop and every sunbeam, in every star and every planet. Here he plunged into a reverie or gazed into vacancy. The calm atmosphere is conducive to communion, and here, in the monastic void, he communed with nature which inspired solemn thoughts in him. He communed with his mind and he communed with his inner self. He thought and he reasoned, he cogitated and he contemplated, he mused and he dreamed. He meditated upon the essence of divinity, the anomalies of life, and the human destiny after death. Here in this great and glorious temple of nature, built by divine hands, his eyes of spirit saw what the eyes of flesh could not see. Here in the sublime sanctuary spoke the solemn voice of
